Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories eBook

Storm bowed his head silently and sighed. But
when the baby, after having rather indifferently submitted
to a caress from me, stretched out its arms to him
and consented with great good humor to a final good-night
kiss, large tears rolled down over his cheeks, while
he smiled, as I thought only the angels could smile.

I am obliged to add before the curtain is dropped
upon this nocturnal drama, that my friend was guilty
of an astonishing piece of Vandalism. When my
landlady had deposited the sleeping child in his large,
exquisitely carved and canopied bed (which, as he declared,
made him feel as if a hundred departed grandees were
his bed-fellows), we both went in to have a final
view of our little foundling. As we stood there,
clasping each other’s hands in silence, Storm
suddenly fixed his eyes with a savage glare upon one
of the bed-posts which contained a tile of porcelain,
representing Joseph leaving his garment in the hand
of Potiphar’s wife; on the post opposite was
seen Samson sheared of his glory and Delilah fleeing
through the opened door with his seven locks in her
hand; a third represented Jezebel being precipitated
from a third-story window, and the subject of the fourth
I have forgotten. It was a remnant of the not
always delicate humor of the seventeenth century.
My friend, with a fierce disgust, strangely out of
keeping with his former mood, pulled a knife from his
pocket, and deliberately proceeded to demolish the
precious tiles. When he had succeeded in breaking
out the last, he turned to me and said:

“I have been an atrocious fool. It is high
time I should get to know it.”

A week later I found four new tiles with designs of
Fra Angelico’s angels installed in the places
of the reprobate Biblical women.

IV.

During the following week, Storm and I, with the aid
of the police, searched New York from one end to the
other; but Emily must have foreseen the event, and
covered up her tracks carefully. Our seeking
was all in vain. In the meanwhile the baby was
not neglected; my friend’s third room, which
had hitherto done service as a sort of state parlor,
was consecrated as a nursery, a stout German nurse
was procured, and much time was devoted to the designing
of a cradle (an odd mixture of the Pompeiian and the
Eastlake style), which was well calculated to stimulate
whatever artistic sense our baby may have been endowed
with. If it had been heir to a throne, its wants
could not have been more carefully studied. Storm
was as flexible as wax in its tiny hand. Life
had suddenly acquired a very definite meaning to him;
he had discovered that he had a valuable stake in it.
Strange as it may seem, the whole gigantic world,
with its manifold and complicated institutions, began
to readjust itself in his mind with sole reference
to its possible influence upon the baby’s fate.